Mini-Review: Agon: The Lost Sword of Toledo

Let us review. I mean, let us recap.
Agon
wanted to be an episodic adventure series, in which you travelled the world
searching for board games. The creators got three episodes out in 2003-2004,
and then vanished into a cave. I didn't hear a word about the fourth episode
until mid-2008, and then -- surprise! -- it was already out (in Europe).
Except it isn't really an episode; in the way of so many sequels, The
Lost Sword of Toledo has inflated until one could call it a full-sized
adventure game. It took as long to release as a full-sized adventure game,
too.

So that's how it's been released. Which is why you might see this game as
Agon 2. The original trio of episodes are now packaged as
Agon: The Mysterious Codex.

That all being clear...

I enjoyed the original episodes, and I was disappointed with this one.
That's the whole review, and I don't want to spend too many pages hashing
over depressing details, so I'll start with a positive note: Lost
Sword has a fine plot. You interact with several characters; they have
stories; they have relationships with each other (if not a lot of on-screen
interaction). You go through stages of discovery and exploration, the plot
develops, you go back to discover more about where you've been, and it all
winds up with a chase scene, a dramatic escape, and a happy ending.

All these things are nicely framed into the game mechanics. It's not a
barren puzzle-fest; the puzzles and locks fit naturally in the story, as do
the clues you discover. Nor does the game devolve into a series of fetch
quests. You have to talk to a lot of characters, and you do some of them
favors, but by and large these interactions don't feel like artificial
obstacles. And they're interleaved with puzzle-y, but realistic,
interactions -- devices and challenges that make sense in the environment
(even without the "everyone is a puzzle fiend" convention of adventure
gaming).

So why am I disappointed?

Pacing. And pacing and pacing. The first thing you do in the game is talk to
someone. The second thing you do is also talk to someone. And then to
another person. Then you solve one (very simple) puzzle, and then you get to
talk to someone else. Each of these people has opinions about every
other person in the game, plus various plot points. The dialogue menus
just go on and on.

Now, this part of the game is fairly broad -- several avenues of exploration
open up early, including both puzzles and character interaction. The
walkthrough I found runs in a different order than I did. But if you're the
kind of player who likes to nail down all the easy stuff before attacking
the puzzles -- and I am -- then you will sit through a good hour of
spoken dialogue before the game gets moving.

(This, by the way, is a wonderful example of why giving your players a
choice does not solve your problem. "The players who like dialogue will go
through all the dialogue, and the players who like puzzles will skip it and
head for the puzzles!" No, wrong person, you are wrong. I went through all
the dialogue because I figured there were clues in it, and because I am a
completist package-hunting nerd. Also I didn't imagine that the game pacing
would be improved by skipping stuff, because, well, why would anything in
the game be a waste of time? Well, there were clues in there, and
the dialogue wasn't a waste of time exactly -- it all existed to set up a
detailed story. But I think it could have been tightened way the
heck up. And mixed in better with you actually doing stuff.)

(At least the voice acting was good. And the accents. I give thanks for
these small things, because I know how much I complain when they're taken
away.)

Another disappointment: three of the big puzzles.

Sound puzzles are always risky, because players have such widely different
capabilities. Some players, for example, are unable to hear sound. Others
have the sound turned off (for any number of reasons that are not your
business as a game designer). These are big problems for sound puzzles, and
have been since
Myst.

But even for the majority of players that do hear game audio,
distinguishing sounds is a gamble. Remembering the sequence of
high-screechy-groan, low-whining-hiss, scrapy-bell-rattle is not easy for
everybody -- and writing it down on your notepad is harder than you might
think. If you thought about it at all. What about melodies? I'll tell you,
I'm weirdly bad at remembering them (and I sang in high school choir for
four years).

In Lost Sword, we have guitar melodies. You hear one; then you go
elsewhere in the game and listen to several, one at a time. Pick out the one
you heard. Whoops, it's not one of them, go back and try some more. You can
recheck the original at any time... give or take a walk across Toledo... but
nothing washes a recently-heard tune out of my head faster than hearing
three newer tunes in a row. So this was just really hard for me.

And the puzzle is tuned (no pun intended) to discourage guessing. You aren't
just trying to pick the right answer off a list; you have to look up some
stuff about the answer, figure out how it fits in, and then guess a little
bit more. This is actually a fine example of how to design a puzzle to
prevent back-solving. Unfortunately, I was guessing about the
melody -- simply because I wasn't confident about my ears -- and therefore
the whole thing was impenetrable. Advantage: walkthrough.

And then they went back and did exactly the same thing with a
visual puzzle. Scattered around the city are various numbered
images. By the time I saw two of them, I knew they were puzzle clues, so I
copied them all down on paper. And when I got to the puzzle that used
them... my notes were useless, because I hadn't copied them obsessively
enough. (They're fiddly, ornate, decorative patterns. Sometimes seen from a
distance. This isn't a
Rhem
symbol-puzzle, where the symbols are artificial and ugly but easy to notate
exactly.)

Again, the puzzle was designed to discourage guessing. There were a few
possible ways to interpret the sequence, so you had to be confident about
the images and then work through the variations. Again, I was unconfident
about the images. Could I have gone back through the city and redrawn all my
notes? Sure. I could also have looked in the walkthrough. Guess which I did.

Third example: developing a photograph. I'm sure I have played a simple,
enjoyable adventure-game scene in which you go into a darkroom and develop a
photograph. I don't remember which game it was. (My review collection only
mentions
Dark Fall,
which handled it awkwardly.)

But the canonical develop-a-photograph scene gives you pans of developer,
stopper, and fixer. Or maybe bottles of those stuffs plus a pan. You dip
your print three times in the right order, no doubt with pointed nudging
from your voiceover. The game doesn't let you screw it up. Because this
isn't a puzzle, except in the broad sense of "something you have to
do to win". You are not figuring out how to develop a photograph;
you are enjoying the experience of successfully developing a photograph.

Or, you could play it the Lost Sword way. Giant rack of reagents.
Instructions on how to mix each processing chemical, one scoop at a time.
Seven mixtures, dealing with both the negative and the print sheet.
Some require you to pull the photo after the right number of real-time
seconds. The rules are are unrealistically strict in some places (I screwed
up one run by using distilled water instead of tap water), and
unrealistically lax in others (you have to turn off the lights to remove the
unfixed negative from its case, but then you can carry it around outdoors.)
You can make mistakes -- you can't make the game unwinnable, but you can
definitely blow a print and have to start a new one.

(I think I found a bug that can make the game unwinnable, actually,
but I didn't have the energy to prove it.)

This is an excellent simulation of the experience of early photography. It
does not belong in this game. Getting it right requires persistence without
brainpower. Screwing up is tedious and unenlightening. Restarting from
scratch is painful.

I saved after every step, and I still looked at a walkthrough after
my first inexplicable failure. (Turned out to be the distilled-water thing.)

So that's a lot of major problems. I had minor problems too. Like the way
the game kept crashing when I looked through the musical scoresheets. Or the
mysteriously-appearing-hotspot problem in many puzzles. Or the cursor bug
that people still get wrong even though mouse cursors have been changing
shape for twenty years now. (Short form: if the menu changes under the
cursor, I shouldn't have to wiggle before clicking. Particularly
when I spend fifteen minutes clicking Menu Item One repeatedly with no other
interaction. See "dialogue menus go on and on", above.)

Lost Sword does, I repeat, have good aspects. I even mentioned some
of them, which makes this a more balanced mini-review than usual. Could I
mention more? Probably -- but when a game sours me early on, I stop enjoying
the good points. That is, I appreciate the art (Lost Sword has
decent scenery), but I'm not putting much effort into the puzzles any more,
so I don't get much out of them.

This is a pity, because the final puzzle was an interesting blend of
adventure puzzle and environmental puzzle, of a sort I've never seen before.
I wish I hadn't been predisposed against it, because I really couldn't tell
if it was insufficiently reactive or if I just wasn't trying hard enough.

As usual for an Agon game, Lost Sword ends with a board
game. As usual, it's a square grid on which two armies alternate moves to
capture each other. I'm tired of those. Go play Blokus or
Transamerica and take notes, people.

This board game was actually less of a game and more of a jumping-pegs
puzzle. The initial setup forces you to sacrifice your first couple of
pieces, so you wind up having to play near-perfectly to catch up. It's not
exactly like a jumping-pegs puzzle, since the enemy makes moves --
but you're working around a medium-dumb AI, so it's the same feel. (I'm
pretty sure that two humans playing this game would always stalemate.) But
heck, a jumping-pegs variation that I've never played -- I enjoyed it.

Overall:
I think the developers sketched out a game design and then jumped into it,
without ever considering the balance and pacing. There were good puzzles and
good interactions and a good storyline; but a few obtrusively weighty
puzzles loom like boulders out of a tide of dialogue, leaving the game's
virtues drowned. Or at least seriously damp.